Just to go slightly off-topic, how does Apple's lossless compare to SHN and APE and the others? I've been ripping to LAME -v0 for so long that it's just habit, but with 2Tb drives going for under $100 these days I might finally make the jump. I, for one, have never been able to justify the quality vs. space tradeoff since even through great speakers I can't tell a difference between -v0 and lossless. (The one tiny benefit of hitting my 40s, I suppose...) What's the reference standard these days? I still search for new encoding methods every once in a while but the same handful of pages that haven't been updated since 2007 are always the ones that pop up.

...just how much of an "invasion of privacy rights" it is when all you have to do is come whizzing by in a camera car to intercept all of this supposedly "private" data. If you're spewing a cloud of personal information around the neighborhood that's unencrypted, unlocked, and unfettered in any way, then I don't think you can expect any more privacy than someone who's in their house and beating the crap out of their spouse so loudly that the entire block can hear it from the street. At some point people are going to have to realize that being on the interwebs doesn't just magically make all of your secrets completely invisible to everyone but those evil Ukranian hax0rs. If it's not encrypted, it's public. Period.

The point that I tried (and utterly failed) to make is that people are getting all up in arms about Google and completely ignoring all of the interceptable hops that your information goes through to get there. Do some of Google's habits bother me? Sure. Do I worry a lot more about the people *between* me and Google? Yes. The information that I give out online that would be easily tied to my real name, occupation, and so on is sandboxed away from the things I'd rather not have follow me around. It's naive to think that someone who *really* wanted to track me couldn't do it, but all of the regular search engines in the world aren't going to tell you anything about me that a $5 PI couldn't figure out in a day and a half.

My point, I guess, is that I keep hearing people freak out like Google is implanting Communism in their brains while they sleep, but they don't worry a bit about the people who aren't nearly as transparent about their activities as Google is and have even more access to everything they do online and I don't see how that thought process works.

You forgot to make fun of the part where I said the telephone companies suck. How are you supposed to earn internet cool guy points if you miss an opportunity to zing me with that edgy, rapier wit of yours?

...but the internet ceased a looooong time ago to be the wild and secretive jungle that we all remember and loved, and it's now a commercial enterprise. Period. I don't understand how people can get so outraged over Google's data-mining without starting long before that. Google, as evil as people think they might be, track *who you say you are*. Of a handful of Gmail accounts that I have, exactly one of them has any information at all that could be traced directly to me. The rest are throwaway accounts, as are my six or seven yahoo accounts, and I don't think I have a single other account anywhere in my own name other than Facebook. When my identity got stolen, computers had nothing to do with it. They either stole my mail or my trash, not my Gmail password. Why do people freak out so much about Google using keyword-targeted advertising that's completely run by a machine that cares not a whit who you are and spends its day searching for "hdtv" or "tentacle porn", but these same people have no problem whatsoever giving their name, address, phone number, credit card number, bank routing information, and direct access to every single byte that comes out of their computer to the phone companies that have proved over and over and *%&$ing over again that they simply DO NOT CARE about their customers and look at them as nothing more than money troughs? (Seriously? $.30 for a text message, but a 650K jpg is free? *^&$ you.) Where's the similar outrage at the telcos, who are less progressive than the MPAA and will roll over for a warrantless wiretap like a wiener dog with an itchy belly? Seriously. Did I miss something?

The entire curriculum will consist of Genesis. The answer to every question is "it was God's will," or "The Lord works in mysterious ways." Any injection of the scientific method into the discussion, pointing out the glaring contradictions in the class text, or other dissent will result in a trip to the pastor... I mean principal's office, where the student will be thrown into water to see if they float. "Creationism 101" should take about 15 minutes of one class period.

The entire curriculum will consist of Genesis. The answer to every question is "it was God's will," or "The Lord works in mysterious ways." Any injection of the scientific method into the discussion, pointing out the glaring contradictions in the class text, or other dissent will result in a trip to the pastor... I mean principal's office, where the student will be thrown into water to see if they float. "Creationism 101" should take about 15 minutes of one class period.